Date: Tue, 16 Jan 2001 09:55:48 -0800 From: Brooks Davis <brooks@one-eyed-alien.net> To: Nik Clayton <nik@FreeBSD.ORG> Cc: Martin Horcicka <horcicka@vol.cz>, freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: man, TOC, xml... Message-ID: <20010116095547.A13543@Odin.AC.HMC.Edu> In-Reply-To: <20010116172751.A3414@canyon.nothing-going-on.org>; from nik@FreeBSD.ORG on Tue, Jan 16, 2001 at 05:27:51PM %2B0000 References: <Pine.BSF.4.30.0101161434550.25916-100000@k2.vol.cz> <20010116172751.A3414@canyon.nothing-going-on.org>
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On Tue, Jan 16, 2001 at 05:27:51PM +0000, Nik Clayton wrote: > We would not be the first Unix to adopt DocBook for man pages. Solaris > does -- Solaris 7 had a mix of DocBook and traditional *roff manual > pages, and, AIUI, Solaris 8 is all DocBook (or rather, SolBook, Sun's > custom, cut down version of DocBook). > > I would support an effort to get DocBook in to the base system, but I > don't have the time right now to drive such an effort. I will, however, > cheerfully sit on the sidelines shouting encouragement and offering > advice. I looked at what Solaris does a while back and they used a script called sgml2roff for formatting. sgml2roff is derived from docbook-to-man.sh which you can get under an X11 license at: http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/tools/dtm/ They actually created a parallel man hierarchy for SGML manpages in /usr/share/man/sman*. This seems like the approch to take if someone wants to work on this. It looks like the required infrastructure is nsgmls from Jade or OpenJade and DocBook itself. I suspect that people will want to modify this stuff to generate mdoc or mdocNG instead of man macros in the roff output. Of course, this thing creates tons of bikeshed issues. For instance, if someone really was crazy enough to try to fight the battle to move manpages into the doc tree, doing it during a conversion to SGML would be the best opportunity that's likely to come along. -- Brooks -- Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message
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